by JACK OATMON

“It’s fucking suicidal,” London’s Kevin Martin laughingly admits when questioned about his recording schedule. A self-described studio rat, Martin, aka the Bug, has crafted a sizable miscellany of tracks in all sorts of musical projects.

“I’m currently working on three albums simultaneously,” says Martin. “In fact, four if you include Warrior Queen. I’m doing a Bug album [his solo project], I’m doing a Ladybug album [the Bug featuring various female vocalists], I’m doing a King Midas Sound album [with spoken word artist/singer Roger Robinson], and I’m helping put together Warrior Queen’s album.”

The various projects he’s involved with are musically distinct, but all are threaded together by the psychedelic, aggressively edited, bass-heavy production style called dub. Martin got wrapped up in dub production during a stay in New York City, while mixing an album from his earlier free-jazz ensemble, God.

“John Zorn came to mix the [God] album with me at [Bill] Laswell’s studio, and because there was such a large amount of information, he was just like, ‘Why don’t we just dub it out?’ It hadn’t occurred to me at that point because a lot of people in the band were jazz musicians who were quite precious about their positions. But as soon as he said it, I was like, ‘Of course!’”

From that point on, Martin has taken to siphoning all his musical creations down to their vital elements with the sometimes simple, but extremely effective, dub techniques that were popularized by King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry in the mid-’70s. He feels that the ideals of dub can be applied to many artistic platforms—“William Burroughs, for instance, and his experiments with literature,” he says, “or film editing. I like the idea of a chaotic editing process that can jump forward, backward, sideways, whatever.”

“Spasticated” is what he calls the music of his solo project. “It’s more related to weight, density, space and atmosphere. Intensity as well. I’m really drawn to intense forms of music. Extreme forms of music. It doesn’t have to be extremely loud. It can be extremely quiet. Anything that wakes you up and jogs you out of the tedious boredom of daytime radio.”

With Ghislain Poirier and DJ Craig at Zoobizarre
on Saturday, Nov. 25, 10 p.m., $10

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